Week #10

Towards desires, away from problems

Hello, everybody!

🎧 Songs I had on repeat this week

(and their beautiful music videos)

• Sweater Weather

🧘 Life

(and 🌎 Entrepreneurship)

• Retired at 21! Here’s how I did it (<15 minutes 📽)

  Retiring early would probably solve way fewer problems than one might think it would. I always refer to MMM’s article Money and Confidence are Interchangeable when discussing why would one want to retire early and stuff like this. People usually lack confidence, not money. Anyway, here are interesting ideas and lessons from Andrew Kirby’s early retirement journey that apply broadly.

  Interesting Ideas:

  • Permissionless leverage

  Code and media are permissionless leverage. They're the leverage behind the newly rich. You can create software and media that works for you while you sleep.

  — Naval (@naval) https://twitter.com/naval/status/1002106893265920000

  • You procrastinate when you don’t believe you can achieve your goals and your negative emotions get stronger than your positive emotions.
  • Knowledge synthesizers

    I recommend reading Show Your Work to learn more about this idea.

  A synthesizer has three roles:

  1. Consume (student)
  2. Curate (philosopher)
  3. Create (teacher)
     — Andrew Kirby (@IAmAndrewKirby) https://twitter.com/IAmAndrewKirby/status/1465537912615817218

  • The Economy moves through Desires

  Whatever you buy, you’re trying to move towards desires, away from problems. Figure out people’s problems and desires, help them, and you’ll get what you deserve. Even better, you can leverage the solutions to your own problems and desires.

  The success formula: solve your own problems and freely share the solutions.

  — Naval (@naval) https://twitter.com/naval/status/1444741381579177984

  • Focus on how to earn more rather than how to lower your expenses

    Too many people spend too much time searching for ways to pay for things as less as possible, completely ignoring the idea that there exist some ways for them to earn more. You can at most lower your expenses to 0 but you can maximize your income to infinity by finding and satisfying people’s desires, finding and solving people’s problems.

• Why I Left Medicine… Forever (<45 minutes 📽)

  Interesting Ideas:

  • What is the purpose of work?
    • Money

      One can argue that the only purpose of work is money. You can have fun, help people, find purpose, and boost your social status in many other ways. But not money. All those things are privileges that you start caring about once you get to the point where you make enough money.

    • Fun/Satisfaction

      Where do fun and work satisfaction come from?

      • Intrinsic Fun

        Some jobs are genuinely fun: you enjoy the work so much that it’s actually fun going to work.

      • Fun Social Vibes

        For some of us, the work itself may not be inherently fun. Going through spreadsheets is not inherently fun. But the good social vibes, the fact that all our friends are at work, that’s what makes it fun.

      • Intellectual Challenge and Learning
    • Helping People
      • We need to differentiate two factors of helping people: the personal joy, and the actual impact.

        Let’s say I’m an investment banker and I make $10.000/hr, and let’s say I volunteer at the local soup kitchen because I like to help people. I’m not actually helping that many people by volunteering at the soup kitchen. If I wanted to genuinely help people, I could just put in an extra few hours of work, make $20.000 and then donate that money to the soup kitchen to allow them to hire a bunch more people to help. The investment banker has far more actual impact if he just donates his money rather than his time, but it feels pretty good to be able to help the person who’s in front of you.

      • When it comes to a developed work healthcare system, is really the system that saves lives rather than the amazing prowess of an individual doctor. Maybe if you’re the world expert on some niche condition and you’re the only person in the world who can solve the thing, then you’re genuinely making a difference as an individual. But, for example, there’s nothing special junior doctors offer to the medical profession, so the real reason they keep doing it is for personal joy and satisfaction rather than the actual impact.
    • Purpose/Meaning
      • Your job can give you something to do with your time
      • Your job can give you a sense of progression and growth
    • Social Status

🎙 Effective Communication

• Jordan Peterson Teaches a Shy Kid How to Communicate (>5 minutes 📽)

  Interesting Ideas:

  • It helps to read. It really helps to write. Not only you should read but you should write down what you think, and if you can do it a little bit every day, say 15 minutes, for 10 years, you really straighten out your thinking.
  • If you’re going to speak effectively, you have to know way more than you’re talking about. If you’re giving a lecture, you want to know 10 times as much as what you’re saying in the lecture.
  • If you’re speaking in front of a group, you’re not delivering a talk to a group. There isn’t a group. There’s only a bunch of individuals. So just look at one person at a time, say something, and you can tell if they’re engaged. Do they look confused? Do they look interested? Angry? Bored? They give you feedback about how you’re doing. Even if they’re not talking, they’re nodding, shifting position, and you can use that to govern the level at which you’re addressing the entire audience.

🦉 Quotes of the week

You don’t learn then start. You start, then learn.— Sahil Lavingia

Broke is temporary, poor is eternal.— Robert T. Kiyosaki

There are two different types of people in the world, those who want to know, and those who want to believe.— Friedrich Nietzsche